“Sorry I’m late,” he called to her. “I had a patient with complications.”
“I thought you flaked out on me. I was gonna leave, but then I got this call and the guy kept me on the line for twenty minutes. All he did was complain.” She walked in and handed him a Coke. “Do you want a glass?”
“Can’s fine. I never bother with glasses.”
“Me neither,” she said, settling back into her chair, crossing her long, slender legs in front of her. She pulled another coaster from her drawer and handed it across the desk to Madison.
“I did call, by the way, from my car. I left a voicemail.”
She glanced over at her phone, where a red light was blinking.
“You said this guy was complaining. About what?”
“Nothing important,” Harding said, brushing the long, thick locks off her face. “We’ve only got a little while before the board meeting. If there’s anything you want to review before we go in…”
“I thought we’d go over the agenda together to make sure we’re on the same page.” He reached into his briefcase and pulled out some papers. “How’s everything been since we spoke? Holding your own?”
“‘Holding my own’ would be a good way of describing it.”
“Good. I know it’s tough trying to learn everything in a crash course, picking up someone else’s work in mid-stream.”
Harding removed a cigarette from her purse and began playing with it in her right hand. “Stepping in at the eleventh hour’s not the hard part.”
Madison was about to remind her she could not smoke, but realized she did not intend to light it. “Not the hard part,” he said. “What do you mean?”
“I’m constantly putting out fires. Everything’s a mess. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you didn’t already know, but Donna wasn’t the greatest organizer. When I first started working with her, I noticed some inefficiencies, but I didn’t realize the scope of it all until I took over.”
“We never seemed to have a problem before,” Madison said. “Her last couple of weeks aside, I always considered Donna to be a consummate professional and quite well prepared.” He glanced at Harding’s desk again, the extreme degree of neatness putting her comments about Donna in perspective.
She placed the cigarette in her mouth and pulled a sheet of paper from a bin on her desk. “Anyway, I got your email with the agenda. Why don’t we go through it?”
Madison sat back, a bit put off by her attitude. He rummaged through his file and found the agenda. He would have to be understanding. She’d had a difficult day. He certainly hadn’t noticed indications of an attitude problem during their prior conversations. On the other hand, they were just quick calls to inform her of things that needed to be done, to touch base on board matters, and other items of that nature that did not allow much independent expression of thought.
They discussed the agenda, matter-of-factly covering each topic in a swift but thorough fashion. For the most part he was educating her on what he was going to be discussing. Since she was only a couple of weeks on the job, her perspective was limited.
Harding would essentially be a figurehead for the meeting to give the appearance of some semblance of order. It was not easy losing the top staff person indefinitely, and he had already received a few calls from board members inquiring as to how they were going to function without Donna. She had been a mainstay of the office, having survived the longest of all other staff associates over the years. She knew the history of the place better than any other existing employee — she was, in essence, its institutional memory.
Yet here was her freshman assistant criticizing her work. It raised Madison’s hackles, but he filed his thoughts away for the time being and tried to focus on the task at hand.
THE BOARD MEETING WENT fairly well. They covered the items on the agenda, and Madison dodged a bullet when discussing Donna’s condition by not providing any specifics. It helped that he did not know many details to begin with. But he and Murphy had decided that it would be best to portray Donna’s absence as a temporary situation, to enable Consortium business to proceed in the short term with as little disruption as possible.
Overall, Harding handled herself professionally. He decided to set up a meeting between just the two of them to spend more time going through procedures and goals.
“How about this Thursday or Friday night? My wife’s taking the kids out of town to visit their uncle so I won’t be cutting into family time.”
“I’ve got a meeting Thursday and I wanted to be at the program we’re running on mainstreaming Friday night.” She shook her head. “This is going to be a tough week. I’ve got so many things to do, so much to learn.”
Madison zipped his briefcase closed. “Don’t worry about it; you’ll do fine. Just take it as it comes, and call me if you have any questions. He glanced at the calendar on his phone. “Why don’t we give you a little breathing room and take it a couple of weeks out, say the twenty-first?”
She tossed her hair back off her face. “Works for me.”
He entered the meeting in his calendar and said good-bye. He was already feeling better about her. New staffing situations rarely went smoothly, and inevitably a few obstacles would surface that required attention. The key was quickly identifying the problems and taking steps to address them.
Madison felt that in scheduling their meeting, they were already working toward ironing out any wrinkles in the fabric of their relationship. In addition, he found himself looking forward to finding out what Harding had identified in Donna’s work that was lacking. Maybe she had indeed found something that could be improved upon. After all, Donna wasn’t perfect. According to Murph, Harding had the basic skills; it was just a matter of
